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Thursday, 10 November 2016

Inside the Loss Clinton Saw Coming....We have some news. It’s not good.”

Hillary Clinton’s communications director Jennifer Palmieri filled the candidate in as the plane landed in Iowa, with campaign manager Robby

Mook in the huddle. Jim Comey’s letter had hit when they were still in the air, without wifi, and now they were all at once processing the news and a game plan and the worry the FBI director had delivered an “existential” hit to a campaign already more nervous than it had been letting on.

Clinton was sitting up in her private cabin, chatting with childhood friend Betsy Ebeling.

“You knew we weren’t done,” Palmieri told the boss.

“I knew there would be something," Clinton told them with a slight smile. “So here it is.”

Here it was. Again. More emails, pretty much the only thing her campaign was about even before it started. And for Clinton, who sees her life as the story of battling back unhinged and unfair partisan attacks, this was the latest round of Them against Us.

Everything that Democrats and pretty much anyone else thought they understood about politics was proven wrong this year with a resounding exclamation mark Tuesday night. All along, this looked like a hard fight, but never a fight that she seemed to be losing, even on the darkest days on a campaign that never quite felt like it was winning, either.